This chart confirms the obvious fact that the United States consumes a large amount of oil, using almost three times more than China, which has a population more than four times that of the United States. The use of energy is likely to remain one of the most important issues in the United States for the foreseeable feature.

Note: Data for the year 2006 is used in many of the charts in this series because it represents the latest year for which the U.S. Department of Energy has collected a complete set of information for all of the oil producing and consuming countries of the world. This provides the data that is used to accurately rank the countries in many categories. The DOE has not yet finished collecting all of the data from 2007. As a result, updated rankings for 2007 are not yet available. As can be seen in other charts in this section, sufficient data is available in some cases to produce accurate charts for the year 2007 and the year 2008 to date.